The Great I Am

Robert Alter’s new translation of the Pentateuch.

In this age of widespread education and flagging creativity, new translations abound. The old standbys who nurtured our youth—Constance Garnett rendering the Russians, C. K. Scott Moncrieff putting his spin on Proust, the Muirs translating Kafka, H. T. Lowe-Porter doing Thomas Mann—are all being retired, with condescending remarks about their slips and elisions, by successors whose more modern versions infallibly miss, it seems to this possibly crotchety scanner, the tone, the voice, the presence of the text that we first read. In general—if it’s generalizations you want—the closer the translator is in age to the translated, the more closely shared their vision and style will be. The Modern Library chose to reprint the 1700-03 translation of “Don Quixote” by Peter Motteux; after that peppery stew of italicized names and apostrophe-bedeck’d past tenses, every other “Quixote” feels watered down.

Of all translations into English, the one most read and universally admired is, of course, the King James Bible (1611), our language’s lone masterpiece produced by committee, at least until this year’s “9/11 Commission Report.” Nevertheless, new translations of the Bible—the world’s best-seller, long out of copyright—tumble forth, for the reasons, if any are offered, that contemporary scholarship presents a superior understanding of ancient Hebrew and that Renaissance English is increasingly, inconveniently archaic. The Hebrew scholar and literary critic Robert Alter, in introducing his thousand-page version, with copious commentary, of the first five books of the Bible—commonly called the Pentateuch or Torah—under the title “The Five Books of Moses” (Norton; $39.95), writes:

**{: .break one} ** Broadly speaking, one may say that in the case of the modern versions, the problem is a shaky sense of English and in the case of the King James Version, a shaky sense of Hebrew. The present translation is an experiment in re-presenting the Bible—and, above all, biblical narrative prose—in a language that conveys with some precision the semantic nuances and the lively orchestration of literary effects of the Hebrew and at the same time has stylistic and rhythmic integrity as literary English. **

Professor Alter, whose earlier works include “Fielding and the Nature of the Novel” (1968) and “A Lion for Love: A Critical Biography of Stendhal” (1979), has been tilling the Biblical fields ever since “The Art of Biblical Narrative” (1981) and “The Art of Biblical Poetry” (1985). As his footnotes, which take up at least half of all but a few pages, make clear, Alter is profoundly steeped not just in the linguistic details of Hebrew but in the nigh-overwhelming amount of previous commentary, including the Midrash of rabbinical interpreters going back to the early centuries of the Christian era. At the same time, he has, as his oeuvre shows, an appetite for literary theory—“Motives for Fiction” (1984), “Partial Magic: The Novel as Self-Conscious Genre” (1975)—and, as the passage quoted above indicates, a resolute sense of the Biblical style to be achieved.

He sees Biblical Hebrew as a “conventionally delimited language, roughly analogous in this respect to the French of the neoclassical theatre” and significantly though indeterminately distinct from the vanished vernacular of three thousand years ago. (The vernacular vocabulary, according to the Spanish Hebrew scholar Angel Sáenz-Badillos, must have exceeded the Bible’s—a lexicon “so restricted that it is hard to believe it could have served all the purposes of quotidian existence in a highly developed society.”) Alter has set himself to create a corresponding English—“stylized, decorous, dignified, and readily identified by its audiences as a language of literature,” with a “slight strangeness,” “beautiful rhythms,” and other qualities (suppleness, precision, concreteness) that “by and large have been given short shrift by translators with their eyes on other goals.” Why should not Alter’s version, its program so richly contemplated and persuasively outlined, become the definitive one, replacing not only the King James but the plethora of its revised, uninspired, and “accessible” versions on the shelf?

Several reasons why not, in the course of my reading through this massive tome (sold sturdily boxed, as if to support its weight), emerged. The sheer amount of accompanying commentary and philological footnotes is one of them. The fifty-four churchmen and scholars empowered at a conference at Hampton Court in January of 1604 to provide an authoritative English Bible had a clear charge: to supply English readers with a self-explanatory text. When they encountered a crux, they took their best guess and worked on; many of the guesses can be improved upon now, but no suggestion of an unclear and imperfect original was allowed to trouble the Word of God. Alter’s more academic and literary commission allows him to luxuriate in the forked possibilities of the Hebrew text, in its oldest forms written entirely in consonants, and without punctuation. Sample footnotes, taken at random from Deuteronomy:

*{: .break one} ** Some recent scholars have accepted Jacob Milgrom’s proposal that here the verb q-r-b (“approach”) is used in a political extension of its cultic meaning, “to encroach upon,” though there is no compelling necessity to see that sense of the word in this verse. ***** ** The second of the two Hebrew words here, we’oyveinu pelilim, is a notorious crux, evidently already a source of puzzlement to the ancient Greek translators… . If one notes that pelilim rhymes richly with ’elilim, “idols,” and if one recalls this poet’s verbal inventiveness in coining designations for the nonentity of the pagan gods, “would-be gods” is a distinct possibility. **

It is difficult for the reader, given the overload of elucidation imposed upon the basic text, to maintain much momentum, and, indeed, one finds welcome refuge from the tedium and harshness of some Biblical passages in the companionable contemporary voice of the learned commentator. However, in his very zeal to communicate the nuances of the underlying Hebrew, Alter falls into the error of Vladimir Nabokov’s translation of “Eugene Onegin”: in the effort to achieve absolute fidelity, he settles on rather odd English.

Take Alter’s version, for starters, of the opening verses of Genesis:

**{: .break one} ** When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters, God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light. **

The King James has it thus:

**{: .break one} ** In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. **

Alter is the more concise, and is not above duplicating certain phrases of the King James, much as the royal committee drew upon the translation of Tyndale. But Alter’s syntax goes off the rails when “God’s breath hovering over the waters” is tacked onto a series of non-parallel nouns; by comparison, “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” is clearer narrative and great poetry. It may stray minutely from the Hebrew but it is theologically intelligible.

Both translations can be usefully compared with that of Everett Fox, also titled “The Five Books of Moses” and published in 1995. Alter cites Fox as the outstanding exception to the general trend of a blandly readable English Bible—an extremist after Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, whose German Bible “flaunts Hebrew etymologies, preserves nearly all repetitions of Hebrew terms, and invents German words.” Fox’s version, set in lines like poetry, reads:

**{: .break one} ** At the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth, when the earth was wild and waste, darkness over the face of Ocean, rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters— God said: Let there be light! And there was light. **

This is a relatively tame specimen; elsewhere, Fox liberally coins compound adjectives like “heavy-with-stubbornness” and verbs like “adulter”—the seventh commandment becomes “You are not to adulter.”

Alter is less extreme, but he does keep the ubiquitous sentence-beginning “and,” derived from the Hebrew particle waw; he retains emphatic repetitions, as in “she, she, too” and “this red red stuff.” He strives to preserve ambiguities and puns in the original. He conspicuously bends colloquial English in such renderings as: “Pharaoh will lift up your head from upon you”; “The land in the seven years of plenty made gatherings”; “A lion’s whelp is Judah, / from the prey, O my son, you mount”; “Israel saw the great hand that the Lord had performed against Egypt”; “Moses would speak, and God would answer him with voice”; “Whether a son it gore or a daughter it gore, according to this practice it shall be done to him”; “and a man lie with her in seed-coupling”; “In the hand of the priest shall be the bitter besetting water”; “And it happened that there were men who were defiled by human corpse”; “ ‘Let us put up a head and return to Egypt’ ”; “And the Lord said to me, saying, ‘Long enough you have swung round this high country.’ ” Alter has an annoying trick, no doubt in deference to the Hebrew, of putting a comma where we expect an article or preposition: “It was evening and it was morning, second day”; “the tree of knowledge, good and evil.” Translating Exodus, he persists in using, in reference to Pharaoh’s heart, the verb “toughened” where the usual translation uses “hardened” (“And Pharaoh’s heart toughened”; “And the Lord toughened Pharaoh’s heart”). He tests our knowledge of livestock terminology by employing “get” as a noun, as in Deuteronomy 28:4: “Blessed the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your soil and the fruit of your beasts, the get of your herds and the offspring of your flock.”

A reader should, however, not shy from the rare but exact word, and none of Alter’s eccentricities of diction substantially undermine his attempt to deliver a strongly rhythmic and ruggedly direct equivalent of the Hebrew. But who will read it? Fanciers of sheer literature will be put off by its bulk and its pedantic cross-weave, and the millions of believers, Christian and Jewish, already have their versions, with cherished, trusted phrasings. The Bible in its centuries of recitation and memorization has generated a host of familiar images that turn out to be mistranslations. Jacob’s ladder is really, it seems, Jacob’s “ramp,” the word in Hebrew occurring only in this instance and suggestive of a Mesopotamian ziggurat. Nor did Jacob, dreaming his dream of angels ascending and descending, have his head pillowed on a stone: “Rashi, followed by some modern scholars, proposes that the stone is not placed under Jacob’s head but alongside it, as a kind of protective barrier.” Joseph’s coat of many colors has been altered to a mere “ornamented tunic.” Onan, it turns out, was guilty not of onanism but, more likely, of prudent coitus interruptus with his brother’s widow. Michelangelo was wrong: Moses did not come down from the mountain with the second edition of the Ten Commandments having sprouted horns, as recorded in the Vulgate and Aquila’s translation into the Greek. His face merely glowed, from its recent exposure to the Divinity.

Reading through this book, or five books, is a wearying, disorienting, and at times revelatory experience. Our interest trends downhill. Of Genesis, Alter writes, “If this were the work of a single writer, one would say he begins at the top of his form.” The Creation, the Garden, the Fall, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, and the patriarchal saga of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph make a more or less continuous story. Rereading it awakened certain sensations from my Sunday-school education, more than sixty years ago, when I seemed to stand on the edge of a brink gazing down at polychrome miniatures of abasement and terror, betrayal and reconciliation. Jacob deceiving blind Isaac with patches of animal hair on the backs of his hands, Joseph being stripped of his gaudy coat and left in a pit by his brothers, little Benjamin being fetched years later by these same treacherous brothers into the imperious presence of a mysterious stranger invested with all Pharaoh’s authority—these glimpses into a world paternal to our own, a robed and sandalled world of origins and crude conflict and direct discourse with God, came to me via flimsy leaflets illustrating that week’s lesson, and were mediated by the mild-mannered commentary of the Sunday-school teacher, a humorless embodiment of small-town respectability, passing on conventional Christianity by rote. Nevertheless, I was stirred and disturbed, feeling exposed to the perilous basis beneath the surface of daily routine, of practical schooling and family interchange and popular culture.

The curious, heated familial closeness of the Biblical narrative distinguishes it from other compilations of legend. Erich Auerbach, in the first chapter of his masterly “Mimesis” (1946), compares Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac with an incident in the Odyssey, and exclaims of the Biblical characters, “How much wider is the pendulum swing of their lives than that of the Homeric heroes!” He explains:

**{: .break one} ** For they are bearers of the divine will, and yet they are fallible, subject to misfortune and humiliation… . There is hardly one of them who does not, like Adam, undergo the deepest humiliation—and hardly one who is not deemed worthy of God’s personal intervention and personal inspiration. **

Leaving God out of it, Auerbach claims that the Biblical protagonists give

**{: .break one} ** a more concrete, direct, and historical impression than the figures of the Homeric world—not because they are better described in terms of sense (the contrary is the case) but because the confused, contradictory multiplicity of events, the psychological and factual cross-purposes, which true history reveals, have not disappeared in the representation but still remain clearly perceptible. **

In Exodus, dominated by Moses, the narrative begins to sour; the warmth and humanity of Genesis drain away. Moses is Israel’s foremost prophet, but he is not a patriarch, and lacks the charm that ancestors possess. The intimate family scale of Genesis yields to something cooler and more mechanical; Alter in his introduction speaks of a “new wide-angle lens” and “the distancing of the central character and the distancing of the figure of God.” Not that God is silent; he has more to say than before or since. Moses is his mouthpiece and, like any lawyer with a demanding client, sometimes loses his temper. The long negotiation with Pharaoh over the release of the Jews from captivity (chapters 7 to 14) is especially aggravating, as God sends plague after plague upon Egypt, only to “toughen” Pharaoh’s heart, each time, just as a deal seems cinched. The plea, in the King James version, “Let my people go,” has become in Alter the more businesslike “Send off My people.” God directs Moses to “tell in the hearing of your son and your son’s son how I toyed with Egypt”; the King James has “what things I have wrought in Egypt,” but Alter’s “toyed” better catches the mood of mounting sadism and vengefulness, up to God’s killing “every firstborn in the land of Egypt from the firstborn of man to the firstborn of beast.” He vows, “From all the gods of Egypt I will exact retribution.”

In the vaulted, newly fashioned skies over Genesis, God, as Auerbach notes, “was not fixed in form and content, and was alone.” In the more crowded and pluralistic world of Exodus, God appears to forget that He is the object of a monotheistic cult. He competes with Pharaoh as an equal. His first commandment declares him to be a jealous god. A footnote to “Who is like You among the gods, O Lord,” admits, “Hebrew writers had no difficulty in conceding the existence of other deities, though always stipulating, as here, their absolute inferiority to the God of Israel.” Not only does primitive polytheism haunt Exodus’s long sojourn in the wilderness but there is a flavor of stage magic: pillars of smoke and flame, rocks that gush water, manna from Heaven, finger-writing in stone, and elaborate specifications for the Ark containing the tablets of the Covenant and the tent enclosing the Ark. The magic of equivalence roughly shapes justice: “You shall pay a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot, a burn for a burn, a wound for a wound, a bruise for a bruise.”

Strictures and specifications continue in Leviticus; indeed, Leviticus contains little else, and reads like an instruction manual for the emergent priestly class and its Levite assistants. Multitudinous avoidances of impurity define the solidifying Israelite identity. Unclean are: carcasses; menstruating women; men who have just had a seminal emission; the meat of reptiles, amphibians, birds of prey, pigs, bats, rats, animals that bring up the cud but lack hooves, and animals that go on four paws. (From the injunction “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk,” presumably a pagan delicacy, was derived the Jewish prohibition of any combination of meat and dairy products.) A vast prophylaxis regulates every bodily activity and constantly reminds the Israelites of their responsibility: they must be kept pure, unique, chosen. An offender shall be “cut off from his kin.” Amid these relentless pages of exclusionary litany, it is a salutary shock to find the inclusive injunction “And you shall love your fellow man as yourself.”

The Book of Numbers extends the enumerative trend with a proud toting up of the Israelite tribes, reckoned to include more than six hundred thousand adult males, and an account of conquests that prepares us, Alter states, “for the defining moment of the crossing of the Jordan, with Joshua in command.” In Deuteronomy, Moses delivers a lengthy, highly rhetorical valedictory to the Israelites as they prepare to cross the Jordan into the Promised Land. He rehearses their forty years of wandering; he repeats laws enunciated in Exodus and Leviticus; he threatens his audience with an outpouring of curses. Consumption and jaundice, madness and blindness, hemorrhoids and drought: “All these curses will come upon you and pursue you and overtake you until you are destroyed.” Moses recites two long and obscure poems that, dating back perhaps to the eleventh century B.C., the time of the Judges, are among the oldest texts in the Bible. The historical events, if any, behind the Biblical descriptions of Exodus are dated to the thirteenth century B.C., and the passionate rhetoric of Deuteronomy was meant, according to Alter, “to persuade audiences in the late First Commonwealth and exilic period of the palpable and authoritative reality of an event that never occurred, or at any rate surely did not occur as it is represented in this text.” The definitive collection and composition, by priestly writers, of much of the Old Testament belongs to the sixth and fifth centuries, in the Babylonian exile, after the descendants of Abraham had seen, God’s promises to the contrary, Jerusalem conquered and the Temple destroyed. The gathering fierceness and strictness of the Torah are those of an embattled people and an embattled priesthood.

In the course of the Pentateuch, God’s personality deteriorates. The deity of Genesis—Who with His own hands fashions Adam from dust (“humus” in one of Alter’s less happy improvements upon the King James text) and Who strolls in the evening cool of Eden, teases Sarah into geriatric childbearing, and wrestles the night away with her grandson Jacob—becomes, after His implacable hail of plagues upon Pharaoh’s land in Exodus, dismayingly cruel. More than once, he urges Moses’ followers to put opposing nations “under the ban”—that is, to massacre them, to commit genocide. “He will cast off many nations from before you,” Moses promises in Deuteronomy:

{: .break one} ** And the Lord your God will give them before you and you shall strike them down. You shall surely put them under the ban. You shall not seal a covenant with them and shall show them no mercy. **

In a footnote, Alter uneasily explains that one commentator calls the emphasis on herem (“the ban”) “utopian” and “wishful thinking.” He adds, “There is, thankfully, no archeological evidence that this program of annihilation was ever implemented.” God advocates herem not just for Canaanite foes but for Israelite cities that have backslid into pagan practices: “You shall surely strike down the inhabitants of that town by the edge of the sword, putting it under the ban, it and everything in it, and its beasts, by the edge of the sword.” Again, Alter pleads utopian thinking. Utopian also must be stoning to death “a man or a woman who does evil in the eyes of the Lord,” or cutting off the offending hand of a woman who, in trying “to rescue her man from the hand of the one striking him,” inadvertently seizes his genitals. Such punishments persist in parts of the Middle East, though the Koran, a thousand years younger than the Pentateuch, is relatively lenient.

The Lord’s striking dead a number of hungry Israelites who have begun to eat some sun-dried quail—“The meat was still between their teeth, it had not yet been chewed, when the Lord’s wrath flared against the people”—seems savage, as does the slaying of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, the leaders of some grumblers. In embarrassment, before their consumption in God’s wrathful fire, Moses tells them, “The Lord has sent me to do all these deeds… . It was not from my own heart.” And God’s treatment of Moses, his servant and spokesman through forty years of trial, puzzles the modern reader: Moses is sentenced to die on Mt. Abarim, in sight of the Promised Land, because he and his brother Aaron, in God’s words, “betrayed Me in the midst of the Israelites through the waters of Meribath-Kadesh in the Wilderness of Zin.” Beg Your pardon? Zin and Kadesh are mentioned in Numbers in connection with a scouting party that came back and said the Canaanites were too big to attack; the alarmed Israelites expressed the view that it might be better to go back to Egypt. For these qualms all the scouts but two, Caleb and Joshua, are slain by God, and the wandering multitude is condemned to forty years of the wilderness. Moses, though he does his best to soothe the indignant deity, is contaminated by this collective faltering of faith, and is left behind on the mountain.

The ferocity of this tribal God measures the ferocity of tribal existence. In Exodus 3:14, when Moses asks God his name, the answer in Hebrew, ’Ehyeh-’Asher-’Ehyeh, has been commonly rendered i am that i am but could be, Alter reports, simply i am, i am. An impression grew upon me, as I made my way through these obdurate old texts, that to the ancient Hebrews God was simply a word for what was: a universe often beautiful and gracious but also implacable and unfathomable. In this encompassing semi-darkness, the figures in the Bible pursue difficulties oddly similar (compared with those of Greek gods and aristocrats) to those in our own problematical, mostly domestic lives, and in this they are the patriarchs and matriarchs of modern fiction, which also offers to illuminate the human predicament. The miracle of the Pentateuch is that, unlike the numerous other tribes and gods that vitally figure in it, the Jews and their God have survived three millennia. The Israelites’ effort to claim and maintain their Promised Land fuels a contemporary crisis and occupies today’s painful headlines. It is still cruelly true that, as we read in the Alter version of Numbers:

**{: .break one} ** If you do not dispossess the inhabitants of the land from before you, it will come about that those of them you leave will become stings in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they will be foes to you on the land in which you dwell. ♦ **

John Updike contributed fiction, poetry, essays, and criticism to The New Yorker for a half century.